A Good Place to Start, But Layoffs Abound
Pros
There are many opportunities for training and education which includes subsidized internal and external courses and certification. There is a growth and continual education mindset in all activities, including challenging and exciting international teamwork. Assignments are often engaging and challenging for career and personal enhancement. Diversity and inclusion are important at IBM, and well integrated into the culture. College internships, new-collar hiring, and high school partnerships provide great opportunities to those just starting or exploring their career options.
Cons
Many years of frequent layoffs.... Often there exists a disjointed work environment, where individuals are expected to continually take on new assignments, without the resources to complete their obligations with the highest level of professionalism. Basically, “get more done with less” and “be good enough” are common and extremely frustrating themes. The company is managed on a quarter by quarter basis. Although employees are told what the long term directives are, layoffs are frequent and deep in order to improve or react to ongoing quarterly revenue failures. This breeds fear and lack of stability into the overall culture of the corporation. Often lower salary international, early career, and contract workers are used as replacements to late career/higher salary laid off workers (aka Resource Actions). There is a general theme that long term employees expect to end their IBM careers by being laid off. This is particularly true within Global Technology Services (GTS), and now also within GBS and Watson. Perhaps the 2020 change in CEO and President will modify this decade long workforce reduction approach. However, the large scale layoffs of second quarter 2020 are an indication that staff cuts will continue to be masked as “workforce rebalancing” and “structural actions”.